Southern Living: Winter beaches

Wool cap cocked low, windbreaker billowing, my father bicycles toward me on the firm beach. Hardy beyond his 80th year, he waves like a delighted boy when he passes. Next comes one of my sisters walking briskly with my mother, whose cap is set smartly against the glare of the Atlantic sun. Nearby my daughter jumps rope at sea's edge. I pull off my mittens, better to finagle the video camera.

Nearly every winter for the last 20 years my family has planned a gettogether like this at a beach in the South. At homes from New York to Alabama we pack our sweatshirts to meet up the last days of the year, highlighted by my parents' anniversary on New Year's Eve. From Virginia to Florida, we locate houses that can accommodate an extended family of lEa place with a spacious kitchen and sofas where kids, with impunity, can sprawl. Many families prefer seaside reunions when the sands are hot and beach towels make rumpled beds for dozing. We are happiest, though, gathering shells and tossing footballs when the air is cjs That winter beaches are mostly empty makes them inviting. To look up and down a stretch of sand and see only family members-doing calisthenics, throwing Frisbeesmakes us feel like we own the place.

Nightfall, too cold for bonfires, drives us indoors. I enjoy watching my 9-year-old daughter bluff my mother in a game of blackjack. Because we are staying in a house none of us owns, no one need play host and turn out humongous meals alone. Even as the game of blackjack winds down, others are taking their turn readying a meal to be served family style, hands reaching across each other for helpings of turkey and sweet potato casserole.

Before long someone turns on a video of previous reunions; we howl at the comedy of ourselves looking thinner, younger, and with fuller heads of hair. We even watch a video of ourselves in Virginia Beach watch ing ourselves in Sea Island, Georgia-modern beach-dwellers caught in a refraction of mirror images. Winter beaches are good places to talk: around the fire with my sisters; on a nature path with my mother; on a peninsula of sand with my wife. In this setting we join our modern families into the large, oldfashioned brood we were part of when little. When my parents tell the story of how they fell in love and took off for Florida from Mobile to tie the knot in the 1930s, the youngest sit amazed that Grammy and Grandaddy could have ever been as romantic and headstrong as that.

Being together at winter beaches brightens that often bluest of holidays. Sometimes, if we're in a mood to go out, we dine at a fancy restaurant. But usually we're content just to entertain ourselves, playing charades until midnight, then heralding the New Year by parading onto the balcony banging pots and pans, witnessed only by startled gulls.

After this day of cycling and walking at Kiawah Island, South Carolina, exhilarated by chill air, we change into our party clothes and venture into the city. At a Charleston restaurant we celebrate my parents' 60th anniversary, giving them funny gifts and personal cards. When the pianist plays "Star Dust," their honeymoon song, all three generations of us take to the dance floor.

We make sure to arrive back at the beach house to clink glasses as the clock strikes 12, praying that the coming year will be a good one. Because we're together, with January stars already at the window and the sea churning its familiar winter song, we feel heartened by the prospects.

Roy Hoffman is writer in residence at The Mobile Press Register.